Related papers: Statistical Physics of Language Maps in the USA
The neutral theory of genetic and linguistic evolution holds that the relative frequencies of variants evolve by random drift. Neutral evolution remains a plausible null model of language change. In this paper we provide evidence against…
The socioeconomic background of people and how they use standard forms of language are not independent, as demonstrated in various sociolinguistic studies. However, the extent to which these correlations may be influenced by the mixing of…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
The distribution of human linguistic groups presents a number of interesting and non-trivial patterns. The distributions of the number of speakers per language and the area each group covers follow log-normal distributions, while population…
This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…
Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration we aim to quantitatively study inter- and intra-regional communication for the first time. This work uses social media posts to first identify…
We investigate the dynamics of two agent based models of language competition. In the first model, each individual can be in one of two possible states, either using language $X$ or language $Y$, while the second model incorporates a third…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
Using the SSWL database of syntactic parameters of world languages, and the MIT Media Lab data on language interactions, we construct a spin glass model of language evolution. We treat binary syntactic parameters as spin states, with…
In cross-lingual language models, representations for many different languages live in the same space. Here, we investigate the linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting sentence-level alignment in cross-lingual pretrained language…
Speech-based clinical tools are increasingly deployed in multilingual settings, yet whether pathological speech markers remain geometrically separable from accent variation remains unclear. Systems may misclassify healthy non-native…
Large language models excel as few-shot learners when provided with appropriate demonstrations, yet this strength becomes problematic in multiturn agent scenarios, where LLMs erroneously mimic their own previous responses as few-shot…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Dialect variation is of considerable interest in linguistics and other social sciences. However, traditionally it has been studied using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly. We introduce novel statistical…
Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems mostly benefit low resource languages but suffer degradation in performance across several languages relative to their monolingual counterparts. Limited studies have focused on…
The explosion in the availability of natural language data in the era of social media has given rise to a host of applications such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Simultaneously, the growing availability of precise geolocation…
Recently, individual-based models originally used for biological purposes revealed interesting insights into processes of the competition of languages. Within this new field of population dynamics a model considering sexual populations with…
Languages are grouped into families that share common linguistic traits. While this approach has been successful in understanding genetic relations between diverse languages, more analyses are needed to accurately quantify their…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…